Apple changed their documentation at my request but it proves they don't care about privacy

I think that is what Maria is saying, and I have no information to the contrary.

To me it's fairly intuitive that if someone has taken the unusual step of explicitly marking their network as "hidden", then its location should not be included in these databases - especially given the fact that the "_nomap" SSID method doesn't work for "hidden" networks.

My impression is that as a result of Maria's communications with them, Apple updated their documentation to note that "hidden" networks are still listed in their database, and removed Maria's own BSSID(s) from the database.

AH! Understood.

Yes. It was possible since GSM was invented, but somebody had to figure out that, and design a methodology. Initially, it involved a written request to the mobile network provider to do calculations using dumps of logs from each tower that could be involved.

And at some time it was automated, and phones could find their rough location instantly.

Oh, they have to support their existing supported hardware at least, and phase them out slowly. Years.

We didn't ask to have it explained. Knowing this is not about skills, though. A mathematician can have very high skills, yet know nothing about networks. Even a skilled computer programmer may not know about them, and be a world master on IBM big iron assembler programming (and being paid handsomely - a tiny fact I happen to know) and not know offhand what the BSSID is.

No, we don't travel with our routers.

My router belongs to the ISP and I have to return it when I move, then I will get a new one at my destination. You should be intelligent enough to accept this. Maybe doesn't happen in your nook of the world, but you must understand that you are posting to an international medium.

Don't be insulting. You can say the same things without insulting people or being patronizing.

...

Ok, finally. The crux of the issue.

That is OT and not in evidence. I only see a single post of him in this thread, in the Android group. I don't see why you can be that angry at him.

...

It is good Usenet manners to explain the SUBJECT in the body.

But, unless I misunderstand the context, the device might not *have* a "mobile data connection". For example a SIM-less tablet/laptop/etc. might still want to determine its position.

I asked ChatGPT for more info. Take with a pinch of salt.

Q: How was it found that the location of a mobile phone (GSM) could be calculated from the data logged by nearby towers? I think it was a doctorate paper?

A: Yes — and I think I know what phenomenon you’re remembering. It wasn’t a single discovery in one doctoral thesis, but there were important early academic/industry papers and theses showing that GSM network measurements could be turned into a geographical position.

The key insight is surprisingly simple: a GSM phone is constantly measuring the surrounding base stations, not just the tower it is currently connected to. What information is available?

A GSM handset/network can provide things such as:

Cell ID — which base station/cell the phone is using. RSSI / received signal strength — how strongly it receives neighbouring cells. Timing Advance (TA) — effectively an estimate of how far the phone is from its serving base station, in discrete distance steps. Measurements from several neighbouring base stations.

If you know where the base stations are, these measurements constrain where the phone can be.

For example, if tower A gives a Timing Advance corresponding roughly to

Phone * / \ / \ / \ / \ / ~2 km \ / \ O \ Tower A \

The phone should lie somewhere around a circle of roughly 2 km radius.

With another tower:

O Tower B / \ / \ / \ / \ / * \ ← possible position / \ / \ O---------------

Tower A

And with three or more measurements, you can narrow it down considerably. But there's an even more interesting version

You don't necessarily need an explicit distance measurement.

The phone reports the signal strengths of surrounding cells. Because radio signals generally get weaker with distance, you can construct an approximate relationship like:

signal strength → estimated distance → geographical position

This is called RSS-based positioning, and with three or more stations it can resemble trilateration.

However, radio propagation is messy — buildings, reflections, terrain, antenna patterns, etc. mean that RSS isn't a reliable direct distance measurement. That's why another approach became very important: fingerprinting.

You can drive around an area recording:

Location Cell A Cell B Cell C Cell D

--------------------------------------------------

Then, when an unknown phone produces:

Cell A = -60 Cell B = -67 Cell C = -77 Cell D = -89

you look for the place in the database whose "radio signature" most closely matches it.

That's GSM fingerprinting, and it's actually a very powerful idea. And your memory of a doctorate/thesis is plausible

There are quite a few doctoral works in this area.

One particularly relevant early work is Christopher Drane, Malcolm Macnaughtan and Craig Scott, “Positioning GSM Telephones,” published in IEEE Communications Magazine in 1998. Interestingly, the authors say they had achieved accurate position measurements using GSM as early as May 1996.

There is also Jian Zhu's 2006 Georgia Tech PhD dissertation, Indoor/Outdoor Location of Cellular Handsets Based on Received Signal Strength, specifically investigating handset positioning from the received signal strengths of surrounding base stations.

And a later PhD dissertation, Zaenab Shakir (Florida Institute of Technology, 2020), deals explicitly with geolocation from signal level measurements and Timing Advance inside the cellular network.

There is also a particularly interesting doctoral thesis by Lauri Wirola on the evolution of cellular positioning standards, covering methods based on cell coverage combined with time delay, time difference and received signal strength. One subtle point

If what you remember is specifically "someone discovered that you could reconstruct the location of a phone from the logs of the towers, without GPS", then I suspect you're remembering something slightly different from ordinary GSM triangulation.

There are techniques where the network's existing logs/measurements — serving cell, neighbouring-cell measurements, Timing Advance, handovers, etc. — can be accumulated over time and used to infer a person's route/location.

That gets particularly interesting because you don't need to know the phone's GPS position at all. The cellular network itself becomes a kind of enormous, distributed positioning system.

If you tell me roughly when you encountered the paper (1990s / 2000s /

Sources:

PPubMed Central (PMC) A Modular Localization System as a Positioning Service for Road Transport - PMC CCiteSeerX Positioning GSM Telephones GGeorgia Tech Repository Indoor/Outdoor Location of Cellular Handsets Based on Received Signal Strength SScholarship Repository "Geolocation Based on Signal Level Measurement and Time Advance Inside " by Zaenab Shakir TTampere University Research Portal Studies on location technology standards evolution in wireless networks - Tampere University Research Portal

Hi Jon,

I appreciate your intelligence as you got everything right tactically. You even got the fact of how shocking the truth is, correct!

You said what Apple is doing is, to you, "highly implausible". I would agree, had I not been horrified to find out Apple is doing it!

The fact Apple is doing it shocked me, which is what started this quest. At that time, Apple said nothing about whether they're doing it.

But I have letters from Apple lawyers saying they will document it. And they did.

So...

It's not only not "highly implausible", but Apple now *says* they do it!

That documentation, which I have in my email records dated months before it was documented, from Apple lawyers, saying that they'd document it, makes it pretty plausible after all.

The fact Apple documents it, when they didn't document it when I first brought this to their attention (and to that of the newsgrops), is pretty good evidence that it's not only NOT "highly implausible" but shockingly true.

The fact it's true is the shocking part. Is it not?

(What you included is interesting too, but to be clear what I was referring to is the "supl" APN type, which AFAIK is intended to be used for positioning information? But it's not something I've researched at all, the extent of my knowledge was searching to try to understand the values in that comma-separated list many years ago.)

Hi Carlos,

The facts are incontrovertible, where only Jon went to the trouble to reproduce them (AFAwK). Everyone else simply used their stone-age knowledge of networking (which we all knew decades ago) to apply to this thread.

Winston just did that, multiple times in this thread, as if stating his own stone-age knowledge of networking has anything to do whatsoever with the topic. Franklin Slootweg tried the same worthless trolling as Winston did.

Please note that there's nothing wrong with people's stone-age knowledge of networking, but their stone-age knowledge, while true, doesn't apply here.

If all they can do in response to the facts posted in this thread is repeat their stone-age thought processes, then they can't possibly add value.

Then you have the trolls like Keith Thompson claiming that running python on Windows to prove what Apple & Android devices do by default with respect to Wi-Fi protocols has absolutely nothing to do with running python on windows to prove how Apple & Google devices differ from how they handle Wi-Fi metadata.

WTF?

These people are all applying their stone-age knowledge of networking, but without taking into account the verified *new* information in this thread.

Not a single person who trolled this thread shows any understanding of it.

WTF? What kind of absurd arguments are you claiming Carlos?

I don't like broccoli, so nobody on the planet likes broccoli?

More to the point, I don't bring the paintings on my wall with me when I move, but that doesn't mean that nobody brings their paintings with them.

The fact you get your access point from the ISP, while true, is an absurd way of your attempt to refute the facts proposed in this respected paper.

I do take my many access points with me, Carlos. Dozens of them. And even if I didn't, it would still refute NOTHING in that research paper.

The fact that's your major rebuttal indicates you haven't read the paper. Read it. Please.

It's not hidden. It is, after all, in the SUBJECT line of this thread, Carlos.

Every person who tried it, found out every single statement to be true.

Hi Jon & Carlos,

The two of you show potential in being able to understand the problem set. Below are a few very important details that you don't know yet.

You're pretty far ahead of everyone else though. Vert far ahead, in fact, in terms of understanding the problem set.

Everyone else is in the stone age, but you're in the modern era. So this is just listing a few more important details you need to know.

I appreciate that Jon Ribbens not only reproduced my own horror when I found my own BSSID in Apple's database (and in no other databases!), but that he explained correctly to Carlos that only Apple does this.

While every one of us likely has the same stone-age knowledge of Wi-Fi networking, the information in this thread is new to almost all of you.

It was even new to me, last December, when, much to my horror, after I read this paper, I found my own hidden-broadcast BSSID/GPS pairs in Apple's db! *Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems*

I was horrified!

The instant I read that paper, I did what almost all of us would do, which is I ran the code to see if what the researches said was true.

It was true! I was shocked.

As Jon has said elsewhere in this thread, what Apple does is "highly implausible"

Especially for a company that claims "we value your privacy"

But the facts are shown, in this thread, easily reproduced as Jon and I have done so, that no application of our stone-age wireless networking prepares us for the shock that Apple ignores all common privacy conventions.

Shockingly, even Google respects the hidden-broadcast BSSID. And those who know me know I don't congratulate Google easily.

But to Jon in particular, and Lawrence, and maybe also Andy, what you don't suspect most likely, is HOW the hidden-broadcast is handled by Apple/Google.

What almost nobody will know unless they researched it with the security professionals, as I have done so, is they handle it different.

Mozilla is documented to say they won't even COLLECT it. a. Let alone save it on the device. Let alone upload it to a cloud db. b. Let alone

Likewise, Android devices never even *see* it (Winston's absurd denial to that fact being brought out as this is the point of me explaining that Winston's stone-age understanding is two or three decades old).

If Android devices can't even *see* it, they don't collect it, save it on device, upload it, store it in a database (or even cull it from the database), nor can they let anyone in the world see it as it's not there.

Only Apple does it the way Apple does it.

Not only does Apple see it, but they collect it. a. They save it on device. b. They upload it to the cloud c. They do not cull it (even though the SSID ends with _nomap!

Worse. unlike Google/Mozilla and everyone else we know of, Apple does not protect it from being tracked by anyone in the world.

That's pretty bad. Is it not?

There are two fundamental issues which are making this task more difficult:

1. The common trolls are *desperate* to infest this thread (and yet, not a single one of the trolls can possibly add value),
2. And, people who are NOT trolls, like Carlos above, still do not (yet) understand the topic because they're applying old knowledge.

Anyone who thinks he'll understand this topic who only knows the stone-age networking basics (which we all know) will *never* understand this topic.

Anyone who says "yep" to that statement, fundamentally doesn't understand that hiding the broadcast works for every outfit on the planet we know of.

Except Apple.

When I write a thread, it's about something important most people can't even fathom, so it takes intelligence to understand the topic.

None of the common trolls, Hank or Franlin or Wolfan, et al. has the intelligence to even begin to understand this topic.

Yet, these trolls, like Nuno Silva, feel *desperate* to say "something", (anything!) because they simply cannot comprehend the topic at hand.

However, some people are intelligent, who, unlike Nuno or Winston or Franklin or Hank, et al., have the intelligence to comprehend the topic.

Only the people who possess the minimum intelligence, can add value here. Not the common trolls like Winston, Slootweg, Nuno Silva, Wolfan, et al.

Carlos, to his credit, is *trying* to bring his level of knowledge out of the stone age of networking, which, let's be clear, we all start with that.

But this topic is not from the stone age of networking. This topic is new.

If people can't follow the trail of the BSSID from the home router to the mass surveillance team somewhere in Russia (or at R122 at Fort Mead), then they have not understood how *different* things are in the modern day.

Three fundamental modern facts need to be understood before someone, like Carlos did above, simply claims "yep" to something completely incorrect.

1. Apple iOS devices see & collect & store & upload BSSID/GPS pairs

If you don't know that difference, you know nothing about this topic. You're in the stone age of knowledge.

That isn't bad. It just means you have to seek to understand before you say "yep" to obviously incorrect assessments of the situation.

1. Apple stores, vets, culls, and distributes its internal WPS cloud db

If you don't know that difference, you know nothing about this topic. You're in the stone age of knowledge.

That isn't bad. It just means you have to seek to understand before you say "yep" to obviously incorrect assessments of the situation.

If anyone is stuck in the stone age of knowledge level, that's fine, as there's nothing wrong with the stone-age knowledge that, oh, say, Winston spewed.

But spewing stone-age knowledge does not help when we all know the stone-age knowledge of networking.

What would help is if people understood the path of the BSSID/GPS pair.

Wrong.

Keith Thompson argues that your post is off topic in comp.lang.python, because you are not discussing python code. You simply posted a link that contains a reference to a Python program and said you run it. You are not discussing the code itself or making any question about it.

And he is right, IMNSHO.

It is fact, Arlen.

I did not say "nobody". That's you reading what is not in what I said.

I don't refute anything, except that you can only track a minority of users worldwide.

No.

It is good Usenet manners to explain the subject in the body.

...

The point we are saying is not what you claim it to be. It is not about Apple storing and publishing BSSIDs of hidden SSIDs. This is bad behaviour by them. Ok. But our point is that you gain nothing by making your AP hidden in the first place.

I guess the challenge here is how can they know not to add the MAC address if the SSID with the "_nomap" request invisible.

That's purely a correlation. It could be a coincidence. And is there any evidence that the documentation did change? We only have his say so.

Maria Sophia snipped-for-privacy@comprehension.com writes: [...]

That is, of course, not at all what I wrote.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you actually understood my point, which is that you are writing multiple long posts on comp.lang.python with no content about programming in Python, and that that's inappropriate. Assuming that you're intelligent enough to understand that, I can only conclude that you are deliberately lying about me.

(On the other hand, if you actually believe what you wrote above, that raises more serious concerns about your veracity.)

The fact that you would lie about something so easily verifiable does not fill me with confidence that you're being truthful about whatever issue you're talking about with respect to Apple and Wi-Fi. It's obviously something that you consider very important, so you might consider not behaving in a manner that will piss off reasonable people and lead them to question your honesty.

I lack both the background and the interest to directly verify or refute your claims. For all I know, everything you've been saying might be perfectly accurate. But because of the reputation you've constructed for yourself here, I can't be sure of that.

I urge everyone participating in this thread to *at least* drop comp.lang.python from the "Newsgroups:" header line, even if Maria adds it back. (I've left it in place for this followup, since I'm discussing topicality in comp.lang.python.)

I once thought like you did and still gave them the benefit of doubt. (Check the "How does whatsapp work?" thread (subjects changed halfway several times, rooted at [1]) on comp.mobile.android.) Then they attacked you and Frank in this fashion.

In the end, they destroyed any value their words could have had. In the past few hours there was another post with nice words to somebody else, but those words mean nothing, for all it takes is a small bit flip somewhere and you're suddenly a "troll" to them.

Yeah, indeed. But which groups are you reading, of the remaining ones?

The thing is, the single thing of hiding the SSID marks the intention that this AP should not be mapped.

Maybe there is not a paper that says this, but google and Mozilla are doing so. Apple was not doing it, and apparently they wrote now in their documentation that they not doing it. ie, they wrote that they will record hidden sites.

People can't understand what the issue is if they don't understand the breadcrumb trail from your router access point to my Win10 python runs.

They just can't. Their stone-age knowledge of networking doesn't prepare them for it.

Keith didn't understand that you have to run the python code that was pointed to in the very first post, Carlos, which Jon found easily.

The instant I read the paper, I found and ran the Python code on Win10. Why can Jon and I do it, but Keith complains he can't read the paper?

BTW, Keith can whine all he wants that Python code isn't python code. But it's clear he's just whining about something he didn't even read.

Jesus Christ, Carlos. Have you never once taken a course in basic logic?

Because you don't own a red car, you claim (in effect) red cars can't exist. Your entire rebuttal consist of that? WTF? It's ridiculous.

For some odd reason, your claim that because you do it one way, that you think that refutes the fact that BILLIONS of people do it differently.

I wouldn't mind if you made that preposterous argument only once, as I'd only need to point out your nonsensical bizarre point of view only once.

But you've been foisting that grotesque farcical rebuttal on us since we started investigating this issue, oh, since way back in December 2026.

When will you stop proposing that absurd rebuttal that the fact you don't own a red car, you think, negates the fact that billions of other people can own red cars?

Clearly you did not read the paper. Read it Carlos.

Do not respond until you've shown you read the paper, please.

If someone hasn't read the paper, they can't possibly understand the issue.

The subject says: a. Apple changed their documentation b. at my request c. but it proves they don't care about privacy

Since we provided the old documentation in the past, those trolls (like Winston) who said there's no "proof", were simply trolling us, as they didn't even read to know it never said that until after I contacted them.

At my request, would be hard for anyone here to verify, although the time points all line up, as you all know I complained about this back in December, and I stated then, that I had my neighbor file the RADAR report.

I also stated at that time, they removed my hidden BSSID, but I'm likely the only one in the world who has had that favor (as far as we would know).

The part about privacy is harder for people on this group to comprehend since they're all seemingly stuck in the stone age of wireless networking.

They don't know how to follow the BSSID/GPS breadcrumb trail from an iOS or Android device (as it's very different!) to the Apple or Google database (as that's different too!) and eventually to the Python code that Keith says doesn't exist but which both Jon and I dutifully ran to confirm.

To put it bluntly, everyone but Apple will NOT distribute your BSSID if it's hidden broadcast. Only Apple refuses to abide by that convention.